Several Q&A community members have asked about whether Wolfram|Alpha can be used to provide solutions on the Q&A boards; a great question that we needed to research before answering. We’ve broken down Wolfram|Alpha’s [complicated] Terms of Use to give you guys some guidelines on what’s acceptable.

You may use any results from Wolfram|Alpha for any personal, non-commercial purpose, including occasional purposes related to your job.

You may post results on non-commercial websites and blogs, as long as you properly credit Wolfram|Alpha.

Possible consequences: Failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram|Alpha may constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law.

To summarize: Because you are posting on the Q&A boards personally (you’re not employed by Chegg, nor is anyone paying you to use Wolfram|Alpha), we see no problem in you choosing to use Wolfram|Alpha to assist with your solution provided you follow their guidelines for citations (see below). If you choose to violate Wolfram|Alpha’s guidelines, then you personally risk violating copyright law and committing academic plagiarism.

It’s up to the asker to select a single Best Answer that is then rated and awarded points. Whether the asker likes a solution generated by Wolfram|Alpha and selects it as the Best Answer is a matter of personal preference and is beyond Chegg’s control. It seems silly for askers to give away points for a Wolfram solution that they could generate themselves, so it’s logical that askers will prefer a solution that is original and choose that solution as the Best Answer.

How to properly attribute results from Wolfram|Alpha:

If you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else (which you do on the Q&A boards), you must include attribution indicating that the results came from Wolfram|Alpha.

Show attribution by linking to the specific query that generated the results you used.

To make things easy, follow the sample format given on Wolfram|Alpha’s website:

If you have any additional questions about Wolfram|Alpha, please let us know! Otherwise, linking to instances of Wolfram|Alpha use on the G+ community page is no longer necessary. Thanks!

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